The Empire probably would leave Skyrim to the Nords if it wasn't for the Thalmor. The Thalmor are pretty much pulling a China except for economy its military, they'll either collapse themselves or the other nations will get tired of 'em and kick them to the ground.

Withdraw? No. Surrender? Yes. An Imperial surrender allows the Empire to pull out of Skyrim and is also by default of sovereignty voids Skyrim's obligation to the WGC.

The difference is that now the Great War have happened. When they included the Khajiit it was still another 70 years before they declared war on the Empire.

Thalmor would still react to it.

Good point, I'll concede on this one, but if they managed to manipulate the hist somehow then Argonian will join the fray.

"Khajit Tower probably shut down (the Khajit are vassals of the Thalmor, and if they are indeed the Stone of their own Tower as per the Lunar Lattice then their Tower is also deactivated)"

True, but I find it hard to believe the Hist would not see that coming concidering that it knew the Oblivion Crisis was coming and apparently it knew that Red Mountain would erupt. It seems to be equally or more skilled at predicting the future than the Thalmor.

Things are looking worse and worse.

From that one Reddit thread:

The Thalmor are really evil/selfish. More so than we all thought before, they're the pinnacle of evil and they effectively want to eradicate men.[indent]
"To kill Man is to reach Heaven, from where we came before the Doom Drum's iniquity. When we accomplish this, we can escape the mockery and long shame of the Material Prison.
To achieve this goal, we must:
1) Erase the Upstart Talos from the mythic. His presence fortifies the Wheel of the Convention, and binds our souls to this plane.
2) Remove Man not just from the world, but from the Pattern of Possibility, so that the very idea of them can be forgotten and thereby never again repeated.
3) With Talos and the Sons of Talos removed, the Dragon will become ours to unbind. The world of mortals will be over. The Dragon will uncoil his hold on the stagnancy of linear time and move as Free Serpent again, moving through the Aether without measure or burden, spilling time along the innumerable roads we once travelled. And with that we will regain the mantle of the imperishable spirit."[/indent]
What PREVENTS them from doing so are the eight towers:

• 
  Cystal Tower (destroyed during oblivion - need citation - also referred to as Crystal-Like-Law)
  
• 
  Red Tower is deactivated (the Stone - http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Heart_of_Lorkhan - has been freed per the events of Morrowind)
  
• 
  Tree-Sap is potentially deactivated or at least not walking around (the Bosmer are influenced by the Thalmor, and they'd want to deactivate it if possible)
  
• 
  Orchalc is destroyed (back with Yokuda)
  
• 
  White-Gold is deactivated (the Amulet of Kings served as the key, and it is no longer active)
  
• 
  Khajit Tower probably shut down (the Khajit are vassals of the Thalmor, and if they are indeed the Stone of their own Tower as per the Lunar Lattice then their Tower is also deactivated)

AND THE MOST IMPORTANT TWO:

• 
  Brass Tower (cast out of Time, doing something weird, but then it breaks time every time you turn it on, so that's understandable) - This relates to [The Ancient Nords using the elder scroll to banish Alduin from the realm of men, it essentially fractured time and simply delaying Alduin's return] and NUMIDIUM the "brass god" which in turn, relates to the mysterious disappearance of the Dwemer. My best guess to explain both the disappearance of the tower AND the Dwemer, is that they attempted to activate it in order to gain control over Numidium, but got banished from Mundus - Alduin style. This implies the Dwemer might come back.
  
• 
  Snow Throat - Throat of the world - STILL ACTIVE and protected by Parrthurnax/High Hrothgar and the greybeards.

[indent]
That's why the Thalmor/Altmer are so interested in Skyrim, and in damaging the Empire's attempts to keep it peaceful. If they can break it, or break the Stone that binds Snow-Throat Tower, then they can bring down what is effectively the last pillar. Then, they will be free to fully unbind the Dragon. Mundus will dissolve, everything within it will cease to exist. Except for the Altmer and other "divine spirits" who were originally bound with the binding of Lorkhan. They will be freed, resuming the connection to the divine that they possessed before Time.[/indent]
Also, "Weynon Stones" is most likely something in relation to the "stone that binds Snow-Throat".

The Khajitt are historically apart of the Aldmeri Dominon, and that was before they showed their true colours (so to speak).

Now that they are out in the open they will have a hard time fooling anyone.

You thought that was bad. IF the AD get into Skyrim and deactivate the Throat of the World....End Game.

That number one is what support the theory of Talos holding Mundus.

If forts were built along the path (like the Eyrie in GoT) Hrothgar would be near unassailable.

The life of all mankind rests on that, the Grey Beards, and possibly Paarthurnax.

It just makes me laugh how Thalmor soldiers often refer to you as a dog, and how they're your owner lol.

The Thalmor, the body of Altmer who direct the Aldmeri Dominion, are the "man behind the man" of Skyrim, the "Big Bad" that manipulates events from behind the scenes. The rightful king and queen of the Summerset Isles? Murdered by the Thalmor. Ulfric Stormcloak, the "rebel" who wants freedom from the Empire and to ascend to the throne of Skyrim (granted, he used the Voice to stun the king of Skyrim and then killed him, which is technically murder and regicide)? He was a Thalmor agent. The Thalmor, led by the Altmer, are playing the Empire against the Stormcloaks, because if they can weaken both of them enough before the Empire can pull itself together to oppose them (potentially spawning a Shezzarine - see below), then they can sweep through and conquer both, and then complete their ultimate plan, as follows (laid out by the Altmer):

"To kill Man is to reach Heaven, from where we came before the Doom Drum's iniquity. When we accomplish this, we can escape the mockery and long shame of the Material Prison.

To achieve this goal, we must:

1) Erase the Upstart Talos from the mythic. His presence fortifies the Wheel of the Convention, and binds our souls to this plane.

2) Remove Man not just from the world, but from the Pattern of Possibility, so that the very http://www.ulthuan.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=37245&start=30# of them can be forgotten and thereby never again repeated.

3) With Talos and the Sons of Talos removed, the Dragon will become ours to unbind. The world of mortals will be over. The Dragon will uncoil his hold on the stagnancy of linear time and move as Free Serpent again, moving through the Aether without measure or burden, spilling time along the innumerable roads we once travelled. And with that we will regain the mantle of the imperishable spirit."

To translate this:

1) The Thalmor are attempting to completely ban Talos worship. Tiber Septim mantled Lorkhan and melded with the Underking/Ysmir and Zurin Arctus into the new Lorkhan, being Talos. He is the +1 Divine, not a part of the original Eight Aedra who became the Earth Bones, but instead fills the void left by Lorkhan/Shor/Shezzar. Remember, the original Lorkhan is dead. His body or "flesh-divinity" was sundered into two halves (the moons Masser and Secunda - yes, those two moons are literally the corpse of a zombie god; fun fact, the sun and stars are holes poked in Mundus from Aetherius), and his Heart was thrown to rest within Red Mountain (also Red Tower, the Heart of Lorkhan being the Stone that is key to the Tower). Talos is effectively the greatest enemy of the Altmer/Thalmor. To the Altmeri, Lorkhan/Shor/Shezzar is not the beneficent creator deity that Man and Beast races attribute to him, but the reason that they lost their link to the divine, becoming trapped within the Mundus and bound to the cycle of the Dreamsleeve and the Earth Bones.

Talos' presence within divinity as the +1 of the Eight is as close as has been gotten to a resurrection of Lorkhan. The only one who would be closer is the Champion of Cyrodiil. The Champion Mantled* both Sheogorath and the Divine Crusader. Sheogorath (the Sithis-shaped hole in the Mundus that Jyggalag fell into) is representative of Lorkhan's sundered divine spark (his Heart, in other words). The Divine Crusader is representative of his physical incarnation as the Champion of Man and a subsoul of Sithis (remember, Lorkhan is the benevolent creator deity to Man, because he is the reason they exist). So in essence, the Champion represents the two sundered halves of Lorkhan, making him the closest being yet seen to a full resurrection of the Doom Drum.

Now, stopping all worship of him probably wouldn't affect Talos all that much, since Tiber-Septim-As-Talos (after Mantling Lorkhan and melding with Zurin Arctus and Ysmir/the Underking in his apotheosis to full godhood) was able to achieve that state known as CHIM. But CHIM has a lot of funny notions associated with it, so it's likely that he wouldn't bother trying to stop them. All they might do is prevent him from incarnating (maybe). Possessing CHIM, he now exists above and beyond the confines of the Mundus and indeed beyond the Godhead that dreams the entire TES setting. But erasing him or minimising his influence is still a nice start.

2) As an extension of this there is the Shezzarine. A Shezzarine is a mortal Champion of Man, and is representative of Lorkhan. The Shezzarine can be the result of a Mantling of Lorkhan or perhaps as an Incarnation (following the cobblestones of drawn-bone destiny), but is a Champion of Man nonetheless, regardless of what their race might actually be. Whenever a Shezzarine shows up, the Altmer absolutely hate it, because it is representative of what binds them to the Mundus. If Man can be erased from reality (literally - they want to erase Man from reality itself) then the Shezzarine will not appear, for the Shezzarine is a Champion of Man. No Man means there is nobody to be the Champion of, or so some of their reasoning goes.

3) The last and ultimate goal, to unbind the Dragon. The Dragon is Akatosh/Alduin/Auri-El, the soul of Anui-El, that aspect of Anu which exists in opposite to Padomay. For this one, you need to understand that in the competition between Akatosh/Alduin/Auri-El and Lorkhan/Shezzar/Shor, the result became that the Ur-Tower, Ada-Mantia, the Adamantium Tower, was the first unassailable spike of reality that was the Mundus, the Stone of the Tower being the Moment of Creation. Akatosh/Alduin/Auri-El became this spike of reality, and became Nirn. Also realise that Akatosh/Alduin/Auri-El is Time, creating the flow, and Lorkhan provides the Padomaic force that stabilises it, directs it. In following him, many other spirits were also bound, among them the Mer (including Altmer, Chimer-later-Dunmer, and so on).

The existence of the Ur-Tower, Ada-Mantia, also means that this is a stabilising effect on space-time. A number of later Towers were also assembled. They are Crystal-Like-Law (on Summerset Isle), Red Tower (Red Mountain on Vvardenfell), Tree-Sap (moves around in Valenwood), Orchalc, White-Gold (in Cyrodiil), Brass Tower (Numidium, Walks-Like-Brass, Big Stompy Robot), Khajit, and Snow-Throat (in Skyrim).

As of TESV, Crystal-Like-Law has been destroyed (Oblivion Crisis), Red Tower is deactivated (the Stone - the Heart of Lorkhan - has been freed per the events of Morrowind), Tree-Sap is potentially deactivated or at least not walking around (the Bosmer are influenced by the Thalmor, and they'd want to deactivate it if possible), Orchalc is destroyed (back with Yokuda), White-Gold is deactivated (the Amulet of Kings served as the key, and it is no longer active), Brass Tower (cast out of Time, doing something weird, but then it breaks time every time you turn it on, so that's understandable), Khajit Tower probably shut down (the Khajit are vassals of the Thalmor, and if they are indeed the Stone of their own Tower as per the Lunar Lattice then their Tower is also deactivated), and Snow-Throat (still active).

Each of these Towers, like the Ur-Tower, serve to stabilise the bubble of Mundus and keep it from dissolving. You can think of them as literally the pillars that hold up reality. By the time of Skyrim, there are potentially as few as one (maybe two counting Brass Tower) of these Towers still active. That's why the Thalmor/Altmer are so interested in Skyrim, and in damaging the Empire's attempts to keep it peaceful. If they can break it, or break the Stone that binds Snow-Throat Tower, then they can bring down what is effectively the last pillar.

Then, they will be free to fully unbind the Dragon. Mundus will dissolve, everything within it will cease to exist. Except for the Altmer and other "divine spirits" who were originally bound with the binding of Lorkhan. They will be freed, resuming the connection to the divine that they possessed before Time.

The price is only the utter erasure of every other living thing (body and soul), and the obliteration of the material plane itself.

So ultimately, no. The Altmer are not good. Some individuals among them are (e.g. Chancellor Ocato from Oblivion), but as a whole they need to be dealt with, because their views on cosmology and reality are unhealthy for everybody else except for the Mer.

* Mantling is a concept in TES Lore. Basically, walk like them until they walk like you. In other words, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. By Mantling somebody, becoming so like them that there is no differentiation between them and you, you become them. However, you remain you, and they remain them. Except they are also you, and you are also them. But you aren't now them, because you remain you, and there is just more of you to go around now.

And the greybeards will willingly let the world end.

Weird how we went from arguing "who's-right-and-who's-wrong" to "This is why the Thalmor want Skyrim and other End of the World Topics".

So long as someone does it righteously and does not harm Paarthurnax.

To be adding what I know as I understand since Talos fortify the wheel of convention than he too fortifies Mundus.

But anyway, let's get back to topic.

I'm willing to bet Bethesda's big dlc or next game will be about the Thalmor and its defeat/victory.

Thalmor defeat would mean the continuation of TES franchise, but on the other hand, thalmor victory means that they can reboot the series.

Of course they will. They'll also be reacting on at least 2, possibly 3 fronts. That's the point yo

Only if next gen will allow the current or new engine to not cut content from the game, like the god-moded camps leaders after the war is over. What's the point of having them unkillable if each side tells you to go kill them.